Sometimes I think it's a wonder that the PCR finally works, though the DNA extraction was questionable and the quality and purity sucks and the primers are far from perfect but designed for another species...

One must presume that long and short arguments contribute to the same end. - Epicurus...except casandra's that did belong to the funniest, most interesting and imaginative (or over-imaginative?) ones, I suppose.

Sometimes I think it's a wonder that the PCR finally works, though the DNA extraction was questionable and the quality and purity sucks and the primers are far from perfect but designed for another species...

All praise the Goddess of Molecular Biology for great is her power.

May your PCR products be long, your protocols short and your boss on holiday

Setting ambitious aims in an irrealistic time schedule AND to be sure to reach the aims within this time table indicates a belief in miracles, doesn´t it?

Sounds like my former supervisor, although he categorically did not believe in luck. He did believe in massive parallelism.

In life we can't repeat the same event in a dozen different ways, and only stop to pick the reality where things worked out to produce a desired outcome.

But for some methods in science, parallelism is possible and thus "miracles" can happen.

In many ways there is an element of luck in the construction of a plasmid or BAC. Which colony on a plate amongst a hundred will contain a properly ligated plasmid, nobody knows. You would have to test them.

Now if the probability of a colony containing a structurally correct plasmid was 1/100 and you only tested 30 colonies, you would need a bit of "luck" to find this 1/100 colony. And imagine if you had to build 6 such plasmids in the space of a month or two, all requiring instances of such "luck" for their construction.. it would then become a miracle to complete the project on schedule.

But what would happen if you could easily and quickly test 100 or better yet 300 colonies (for instance with the help of a multichannel pipette/PCR or a robot). Now, what once a lucky event becomes a certainty. And a miracle is reduced to an everyday chore.

This probably isn't quite what you had in mind. But I guess I am try to say is with some ingenuity, perhaps a change in methods, it is sometimes possible to incorporate parallelism into an experiment design. This allows the isolation of a desired outcome even if the probability of a successful event is rare,

May your PCR products be long, your protocols short and your boss on holiday

as far as I am aware of this phenomenon, it is like "if everything works out like it should theoretically, it will be done in 1/2 month, but more probable (as biology never turns out as it is supposed to) it will thake you 3/4 month to accomplish that goal"

so most it is hope what you describe as looking for miracles??? And timeplans never work out, this would be a miracle itself.

A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. (Oscar Wilde)